Archives for 2008

Should I buy books before classes start or wait until after the first meeting?
It depends on how you look at it and what your situation is. Buying early is a great way to avoid waiting in long lines, and if you’re planning to buy used books, buying early will help you to ensure that you get the used books before they sell out. Also, if there is absolutely no chance that you will drop the class, I suggest buying your books early.

However, if you are sort of “feeling” your way through, and you think there is a possibility that you may drop a class that you’re unsure about/nervous about, you may want to attend a class before you actually buy the book, in order to avoid having to return the books later. Even if you just decide to postpone the class for another semester, and you keep the books, the books that you have may not be the ones used when you sign up for the class again.

Can I use financial aid to buy books?
This depends on your school’s financial aid policy. In some cases aid is not disbursed for a couple of weeks, and there is no system to deduct the cost of books from you account, so you will need to buy them with your own money. On the other hand some schools will allow you to come and pick up your books ahead of time using financial aid, and the amount will be deducted from your account. Meanwhile other schools will let you use financial aid, but they won’t actually allow you to pick up books until the first day of class. Just go several weeks ahead of time to find out what the policies are at your school.

If a book for one of my classes is labeled, “Optional,” “Supplemental,” or “Not Required,” should I buy it? I personally like to have all the books even if they’re not required (as long as it doesn’t cost an arm & a leg). But often these “unrequired”books are just an added reference, a study guide, or it may be that the book is used by some teachers and not others. If a book on your list is “Not Required,” I suggest visiting the professor or waiting until the first day of class before buying the book. (And keep in mind, often these “supplemental” texts are not returnable.)

My school uses efollet.com to sell books online. Should I use this service or buy on campus?
Efollet is a convenient way to order your books, and it allows you to have the books shipped to your home or you can choose to pick them up at the bookstore, and it’s great because it saves you time (& a trip to the school, if you live away). The price will be the same whether you use the website or purchase them from the school store (except that you have to pay shipping costs to get them sent to your home). In fact, when you buy from efollet, the clerks at your school store will actually be the ones that fill the order (at least that’s the way it is at the schools I’ve had experience with). The good thing about buying books in person at your store is that you get to pick them out yourself, which means if you’re buying a used book, you can choose between getting a nice looking used book versus one that may be torn or written in.

Do I have to buy books from my book store?
No. You have other options. In short, there are several reputable sites where you can buy new & used books online. And most likely there is an off campus bookstore that sells the books you need at a lower price than the school store. In the next post, I’ll be pointing out some more specific ways that you can get your books online and offline and save money (up to 50 & 75% or possibly more).

In the upcoming posts, I’ll have some tips on buying and selling textbooks (which can be applied to everyday books as well), and I’ll have some other information to keep in mind before buying your college textbooks.

But first, I wanted to share this information about where the money actually goes when you buy textbooks (and other books for that matter). I first saw this information on a poster outside my college bookstore…I guess they know that everybody complains about the costs of books, so they felt a need to explain themselves.

The information I’m posting here was published in 2003 (sorry I couldn’t find a more updated version), but I expect that the numbers are probably about the same today (with perhaps the exception of Freight, which I’m sure is now a slightly bigger percentage of the total cost) You can take a look at the actual chart of this information here: Where The New Textbook Dollar Goes

Here is a summary of the info –

For Every One Dollar Spent on Textbooks:
32.3 cents goes to Publisher’s Paper, Printing, and Editorial costs (production)
11.6 cents goes to Author income (research & writing costs)
10 cents Publisher’s General & administrative (state & fed taxes)
15.4 cents Publisher’s advertising costs (marketing, sending out free copies, etc)
7.1 cents Publisher’s income (after they pay taxes -goes toward new product developement & paying dividends to stock holders)
1.2 cents Freight (this amount has probably risen, in conjunction with gas prices)
11.3 cents for College Bookstore personnel
6.6 cents for college store operations
4.5 cents (pre-tax) for college bookstore income

To me, the most interesting part of this data is that the bookstore gets a total of 22.4% of the money. Obviously they have to pay for employees & operational costs, and we could sit and argue all day long about whether schools & publishing companies are profiting too much from poor students, and we’d never agree on a definitive answer…but I think that if the school book store is there to serve the students (& without the students there is no bookstore), they should make no more than a limited profit. (and of course, in addition to the 22.4% they make from the sell of new books, they also profit again when they buy back the book for practically nothing and then resell it for a higher amount than it was bought back for.)

I mean no offense to those who work at college bookstores, most clerks that I’ve met are very nice people (and you guys don’t set the price or buy back policies). But I’ve never met a single student or teacher that doesn’t think the cost of textbooks is too high, so I wanted to highlight this issue and try to help people who will be buying textbooks for the first time in the next few months or years, and I think the percentages on this chart are interesting to look at as an introduction to the topic.